Crystallographic Information File

Crystallographic Information File (CIF) is a standard text file format for representing crystallographic information, promulgated by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). CIF was developed by the IUCr Working Party on Crystallographic Information in an effort sponsored by the IUCr Commission on Crystallographic Data and the IUCr Commission on Journals. The file format was initially published by Hall, Allen, and Brown^[1] and has since been revised, most recently versions 1.1 and 2.0.^[2] Full specifications for the format are available at the IUCr website. Many computer programs for molecular viewing are compatible with this format, including Jmol.

Crystallographic Information File

Filename extension	.cif
Internet media type	chemical/x-cif
Developed by	International Union of Crystallography (IUCr)
Type of format	chemical file format
Extended from	Self-defining Text Archive and Retrieval
Extended to	mmCIF
Website	www.iucr.org/resources/cif

mmCIF

Main article: Macromolecular Crystallographic Information File

Closely related is mmCIF, macromolecular CIF,^[3] which is intended as an successor to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) format. It is now the default format used by the Protein Data Bank.^[4][5]

Also closely related is Crystallographic Information Framework, a broader system of exchange protocols based on data dictionaries and relational rules expressible in different machine-readable manifestations, including, but not restricted to, Crystallographic Information File and XML.